Tag Archives: lessons learned

At a Mobile Literacy Network Meeting this week hosted by the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, I talked about Paperight, why we had to close, and some of the lessons my team and I are taking to our next ventures – particularly Bettercare and Book Dash.

In the next ten minutes I’m going to talk about three things: what was Paperight, why we had to close, and a few lessons (out of a great many) that I’m taking into my next ventures.

But first, a quick note on learning lessons from disappointment.

Hindsight is cruel, because it’s almost certainly wrong.

The disappointment you feel when you decide that your project didn’t work only indicates what particular set of circumstances, and series of events, didn’t work out the way you hoped. That disappointment makes us regret our decisions, and looking back we’re tempted to say ‘We should have done this instead.’ The problem is that your journey was one of an infinite number of possible alternatives, and you have no way of knowing what exactly you should have done differently.

So when we draw lessons, we can say ‘For us, this didn’t work and this did’. We can’t say ‘If we’d done this, everything would have turned out well.’

It’s okay to say ‘This didn’t work.’

It’s foolish to say ‘This would have worked better.’

Watch out for that trap of wishful alternatives. Once you start noticing it, you realise that we all fall into it all the time, wasting energy on we-should-haves.

It also means that our lessons might not apply to your project directly, but perhaps they are a rough guide to potential challenges.

So, let’s see what happened to Paperight.

At Paperight we built a network of independent print shops that could print books out for their customers on demand.

We worked with publishers to provide an online library of books that print shops could legally download, print and sell to customers.

We wanted to:

turn photocopiers into bookstores in every village in Africa

dramatically reduce the cost of tertiary (higher-ed, university college) textbooks

But revenue just didn’t climb. I began to realise that, starting from a small base, a trickle can look like traction. A trickle can inspire confidence that is both valuable – to confidence, to our ability to sell – and misleading. It’s a dangerous time for an ambitious team, because both trickle and traction make you think your model is working, and that it’s time to plan for scale. A trickle can hide fundamental problems with your model.

A trickle can look like traction. It’s a dangerous time for an ambitious team, because both make you think your model is working, and that it’s time to plan for scale. A trickle can hide fundamental problems with your model.

In 2.5 years we charged R57500 in licence fees. Of this:

R26000 to publishers

R20000 as a publisher ourselves

R11500 in commission

That wasn’t enough to meet one month’s payroll. More importantly, after a year the rate of growth in sales had slowed to almost zero.

Our problems were of course, in part, the result our strategic decisions: out of an infinite number of possible alternatives, some would have been better than others. But aside from that, we knew we had three major external challenges:

Most copy shops were not active partners, which is not surprising when we had so few high-value titles for them to promote. Many also gave their customers poor service (we double-checked ourselves spending hours and days in stores).

One small collection of high-value, low-price titles made as much as all our other sales combined.

Despite our disappointment, buried in those revenue stats is a promising story: we made far more as a publisher than as a distributor. We had created a hundred simple, low-priced books of our own: collections of past grade-12 exam papers. That one small collection of high-value, low-priced titles made as much as all our other sales combined. And that’s after those past-papers were free for the first seven months.

Even though we made so much of our revenue from past exam papers, we often regretted deciding to charge for them. When they were still free, we made really good headway growing customers for copy shops in poor areas, especially in Khayelitsha and in peri-urban Eastern Cape towns.

From the day we started charging for them – between $1 and $2 a copy – those sales declined massively. It was a great lesson in the infinite distance between free and paid.

Free content is easy to sell. Paid content is infinitely more difficult.
You don’t just ‘add on’ paid to a free model. Payment changes a project fundamentally.

Still, we really wanted to prove a paid model. And we did have paying customers.

If I had to draw broad conclusions from this, I’d confidently say that if we’d had the right content, we could have done well.

A few high-value titles will sell. But it’s almost impossible to build a working experiment relying on commercial publishers’ content. Experimental projects like ours need high-value content to work with. If it’s open-licensed, we all get much further much faster. It’s critical that impact-minded content projects and funders prioritise open licensing.

I was determined to push for change in publishing by enabling a better way to sell. But I now believe that you cannot create industrial change by enabling its participants.

‘Here’s a tool that will change the way you work!’ No one wants a tool that will change the way they work. Work is complicated enough as it is.

Nonetheless, change must be possible. We just need different motivators. So I’ll try a different approach: competition. I’m actively implementing open-access models, easy licenses and print-on-demand at Bettercare.

If we can take market share at Bettercare by doing things differently, perhaps we’ll tempt established players to do the same.

Meanwhile, in other work I’ll focus on building readership for the long term. If twenty years ago, South African publishers had made a concerted effort to invest in early-childhood reading, perhaps Paperight’s distributed print-on-demand might have worked out better.

Some of our outlets approached us saying that they would be more comfortable using our service if we would operate on a credit system, giving them the ability to spend credits and pay later.

Wizardz

Juta (cancelled after acquisition by Protea Books)

AloeX

Process

We increased the topup values on our outlets accounts by paying the money ourselves which the outlets then owe to us. The benefit for the outlet is that they do not need to make a top-up before they can make a licensed sale to their customer.

Outcomes

The outlets we tried this system with did not feel as though they had invested into the service that we provide and therefore were less motivated to sell our products.

Conclusion

customer service in most copy shops is atrocious. This is a major blow to our business model

We have finally concluded, under the weight of years of anecdotal evidence and topped off with a full day in a top Stellenbosch copy shop, that customer service in most copy shops is atrocious. This is a major blow to our business model. I’d long worked on the assumption that 80% of stores would offer good service (or care about offering good service and aim for that actively), and 20% would be bad. I’ve now come to believe the opposite is true. As a result, under our current model we will never consistently create return customers. And without return customers, we could never hit the growth rates we need in order to sustain our current overheads.

We’ve tried hard to train outlets, but managers consistently gatekeep or just don’t work with us. We would only be able to tackle this problem in the long term by owning or franchising the outlets ourselves, which is beyond the scope of the project.

I have decided to cut my team, drastically cut costs, and see whether there are new opportunities for Paperight licensing to explore

As a result, I have decided to cut my team, drastically cut costs, and see whether there are new opportunities for Paperight licensing to explore during the last months of my fellowship. I’d prefer not to close the Paperight service, though it is an option. I’m also talking to potential acquirers, but an acquisition is unlikely.

For now, all discussion of Paperight’s model being flawed, reducing the team, and possible project closure is confidential and not for public consumption. We will certainly share our story in time, but right now we need to be able to craft the public story if we want to create a home for the Paperight service elsewhere and maintain the credibility of the concept of distributed print-on-demand.

Killer metrics

Our main metric is turnover from sales in dollars. We maintained our growing targets till October last year, but slipped dramatically since Nov. At the end of January, for the first time, we slipped below our cumulative ‘Mort’ figure, the minimum target for achieving self-sustainability. That’s a core reason I’m cutting the team and revisiting the core business model. I hope to find a way to keep the project going, though it may not be as an independent company (Paperight Pty Ltd) or as the service we know today.

We also track outlet and publisher registrations, top-ups (credit balances that outlets maintain in order to be able to buy books), and various PR metrics (newsletter opens/clicks, Facebook engagement, Twitter followers, website visits), but we only aim to increase these generally. Sales revenue is the key driver of decision-making.

During March and April we’ll reduce that by 6 people and keep only our COO, with financial management done on a part-time freelance basis by our current financial manager, Dezre, who will be employed by my other company Electric Book Works.

This is a big blow. But we’ll figure it out. I’m glad we’ve reached this point while we still have a funding runway to work with.

Marie and I had the opportunity to go through to Stellenbosch for most of the day to train up some of our existing outlets. Even though they had been trained in person by Yazeed and had been guided in depth over the phone by Nick and Marie, they were still battling to use our website and our services effectively.

We had received some complaints from customers that they had waited more than a week and had not received even a quote from the outlets. The outlets were defensive saying that they had not received sufficient training and did not have sufficient time to explore the services themselves.

The experience that we had with the outlets was not isolated to the ones in Stellenbosch. We have had many phone calls from frustrated customers who have complained that copy shops had either not replied, taken days to deliver their order or not provided the service that they wanted. This made things quite complicated for us as some outlets would give excellent service and were committed to serving their customers and others seemed to find the opportunity to work as a Paperight outlet a burdensome event.

Some outlets even admitted to turning customers away. One of the more frequent reasons for outlets turning customers away was the fact that new staff members had not been made aware of the Paperight service and therefore advised that they could not assist.

We have been saddened that some of our customers have walked away dissatisfied as we had little control over the level of customer service received. The customers who have been to our top outlets and received great service have all walked away satisfied with the end product.

Each day we are striving to improve these gaps by communicating with our outlets and preserving the relationships which share our values and serviceability.

By August 2013, I felt that our methods of creating materials was creating undue stress on me and, even worse, that they weren’t working particularly well. (Even though they probably were.) To make sure that materials would be created in an efficient manner and, more importantly, that they would be used by outlets once they had them, I devised a simple briefing system that everyone in the company had to use in full if they wanted me to make materials for them.

Each brief had to take five things into account for each piece of material required for any project:

What is its purpose? (e.g. to increase sales of a certain book(s), to increase sales at a certain outlet, to allow customers to easily browse products.) If a material has no real purpose behind its creation (“point of sales”, for example, is not a purpose), nothing will come of it, and it will be a waste of time. Its purpose will also inform other crucial parts of the material’s design.

What will it look like? What format will it take? How big will it be? Is it print or electronic? Is it in colour, or black-and-white? Where is it going to appear?

What details have to be on it? If it’s for an outlet, for example, what details for the outlet need to be on it (address, e-mail, phone number, etc.) and what are those details? Is there a price list on it, and if so, what are the outlet’s prices? Does the material need another organisation’s logo on it, and if so, have you got that logo organised already?

How will you make sure this material will succeed in its purpose? How do we make sure the material is printed or distributed effectively? If it is left up to an outlet or other organisation to distribute it, then how to we make sure that it has been distributed?

What are the metrics by which this material will be judged to be successful? How will we judge that the production of this material is an effective use of company time, and on what time frame? Or, if you’d like to use Shuttleworth Foundation terminology, what do you expect to see from the production of this material, what would you like to see, and what would you love to see?

I hoped that if we were to consider all of these aspects before we produced materials, we would cut down on unnecessary revisions to materials and the production of unnecessary materials – in short, time-wasting.

So effective was the briefing system that I managed to get through the amount of work that I would ordinarily do in five days, in three days.

Happily, it worked. Marie and I were able to more efficiently get through our work, and it avoided a large amount of unnecessary work for the both of us. So effective was the briefing system that I managed to get through the amount of work that I would ordinarily do in five days, in three days.

It also forced us to think about marketing campaigns in a more nuanced and planned manner – instead of starting a campaign and producing materials ad hoc for it, as we usually tended to do, we would work out exactly what we needed to produce before we started the campaign, and figure out the most efficient ways for us to produce and personalise them, if needed. It meant that, when we embarked on our matric exam paper campaigns and, later, the #textbookrevolution campaign, we could spend as much time following up and doing new things in response to new developments in the campaign as we needed to, without the hassle of having to revisit messaging or price lists or product lists, etc., as we had to do in the past.

Between May and August 2013, we offered a monthly reward of R1000 to the best sales person throughout the Paperight network of registered copy shops.

The challenge was announced through the weekly newsletter and on the Paperight blog. Our intentions were to drive sales of Paperight books, encourage copy shop employees to familiarise themselves with paperight.com, and to drive home the need for all employees to have their own individual Paperight accounts, albeit subsidiary ones to their main business account.

Individual staff accountability within copy shops has been an uphill battle and a necessary struggle to secure the safety of the book titles already available through the Paperight network. In order to negotiate with publishers, it is essential that we put all the measures that we can in place to protect their copyright and offer complete reassurance of our efforts to combat book piracy. Knowing who specifically has accessed certain titles can assist Paperight and the copy shops themselves to identify any potential pirates.

Similarly, there has been an unusual trend through copy shop owners to not inform their staff that they are officially offering a new service, namely Paperight. The number of customers that have been turned away simply due to ignorance on the part of the copy shop employee cannot be measured, however we have had feedback from customers to let us know that it has happened to them. We hoped to also remedy this issue with this competition.

The winner was announced for each month in the first week of the following month, once we had double checked everyone’s sales figures.

Our very few ‘fine print’ rules were:

Free documents do not count towards sales (e.g. Quirk Emarketing and College Campus guides) – that would make it too easy to cheat!

The customer’s first and last names MUST BE INCLUDED on every purchase.

The competition is only for South African shops.

The winners were:

May 2013: Dean Mostert of Minuteman Press

June 2013: Aletta de Witt of Aloe X

July 2013: Unice Davies of Revprint Claremont

August 2013: Hennie van der Merwe of Minuteman Press Vanderbijlpark

The competition was supposed to run from May to December 2013. However, by August 2013, we came to realise that copy shop managers were not sharing Paperight information and news (shared through the newsletter) with their staff so the competition became effectively meaningless.

More often than not, copy shop managers expressed an unwillingness to share the Paperight account details with all of their staff in order to prevent abuse of the system. This was an unexpected insight as it showed us just how serious these managers are about avoiding copyright infringement in store- which is great reassurance in our negotiations with publishers about distributing their content through Paperight.

To increase Paperight study-material sales (and better understand our copy-shop partners), we decided as a team to individually adopt a registered Paperight copy shop and try to partner them with a local school. The aim was to test various methods of promotion (specifically to parents of high school students) and to simultaneously build close relationships with a small batch of copy shops that would ultimately become Paperight Premium Outlets in future. For more on that, read Yazeed’s entries.

Despite our best intentions, this project did not come together according to plan.

One of our major in-house hurdles has been finding the time to get out of the office, to spend time in our adopted copy shops, as well as visiting local schools on their behalf. We managed to find time to do so, but not easily and certainly not as often as we should have done.

Once we had identified schools to visit, we submitted briefs to Nick for personalised promotional materials. Specifically, we took posters and flyers to the schools highlighting educational materials (past exam papers, study guides and textbooks) available through their local Paperight registered copy shops, emphasising the copy shops’ competitively low pricing. The materials themselves were succinct enough to avoid confusion about how the Paperight/copy shop partnership works and the flyers doubled as ordering forms to cut down on the necessary steps to make a sale.

Once the posters and flyers were printed, we liaised with school secretaries for permission to bring them onto school campus. The posters were placed in obvious places, such as in the secretaries’ offices, in entrance lobbies, near school shops and near matric classrooms. Similarly, the flyers were given to matric class teachers to hand out to students in registration class.

more often than not the copy shop managers were either unwilling to do so or too busy to do so

Each team member managed to make the beginning steps to build the relationships, but we all found that we needed our chosen copy shops to really step up to sustain the partnership. However, more often than not the copy shop managers were either unwilling to do so or too busy to do so.

Apart from this, we found that our promotional materials led to only small spikes of sales. I believe this is directly related to the materials being present on the schools’ campuses and not visible enough to the students’ parents. I’m also quite sure that students made paper airplanes out of the flyers rather than giving them to their parents. The kinds of students who ultimately ended up in store buying past papers and study guides were typically the kind that did not need a flyer or poster to discover Paperight because they’re particularly proactive with regards to their studies. This failing on our part informed our marketing efforts that became the Matric Exam Campaign.

This project did not intend to change the schools’ official book purchasing protocols, but instead aimed to turn parents over to using Paperight . Ultimately, parents are the ones who have the most invested in their child’s success and it was on this personal interest that we hoped to ignite support for the Paperight project.

If I could pick out one overarching lesson learned from all this, I would say that the principal of any school sets the benchmark and with their support of a new initiative or supplier, the rest of school will fall into line. This has been proven by Yazeed’s wonderful work with Pelikan Park High School. Despite the difficulty of building a strong relationship like this, the rewards are manifold and certainly worth the work put it. More relationships like this could carry Paperight well into self-sustainability.

We discovered soon after we began to create outlet- and product-specific posters and send them out via our newsletter that they made a difference to sales. In fact, a survey done by Yazeed at one point showed that outlets that advertised with posters had more success than others. (This, in retrospect, is incredibly obvious, but we thought people might have been driven to stores or to buy products by being encouraged to do so by… well, I’m not sure, actually.)

When Marie arrived in April 2013, it freed me up to do more material design work. Marie set about calling outlets to find out more about them and to make sure they were on board with our system. We made sure that, when she called an outlet, she asked if they wanted any materials made for them for the upcoming matric exam season. As part of our offering, we would design posters and flyers. These materials included price lists on them for up to 50 of our matric products, which we could change for every outlet that wanted them. There was sound reasoning behind this, initially: we assumed that, if we did the heavy lifting for outlets and gave them something specific to them and ready-made for them, they would take to using materials with more enthusiasm, and would get some outlets that didn’t have design capabilities to be able to engage with and to advertise Paperight better.

This was a pretty disastrous idea, for a number of reasons:

The amount of requests for materials that we got was overwhelming, and we only had one designer: me, who had many other responsibilities to take care of.

Outlets sometimes weren’t even too sure of their own pricing structures, or would arbitrarily change things, and so would ask us to make multiple revisions to the same materials because they couldn’t be bothered to tell us what their prices were and, even if they did, tended not to stick to them.

Manually changing 50 or so prices for every flyer and poster, and copy-pasting logos and contact details, was mindnumbing and uncreative work. I felt like I missed a month of my life around July, as every day was the same task, in a sense.

Outlets didn’t buy into the materials as much as we hoped. Some never printed them, effectively making the work a waste of time.

These problems piled the misery on me, with the result that I entered into quite a deep slump for a few weeks. I began to resent my work and what I was doing and, even worse, the people I was supplying materials for. The work was repetitive and seemed to have little effect on sales and/or engagement with products with outlet owners. I realised that something drastic had to change.

In November 2012, we started work with Nicole Sochen and her company, al dente PR. In the light of our SAB Innovation Award Seed Grant, she was to advise us on and establish our initial media collateral, such as a boiler plate, company info sheet and company profile, as well as compiling a media list, and to help us send out and follow up on our first press releases.

We started work together even before she was contracted to us, as we thought that we needed to spread the word about our matric exam campaign as soon as possible. We drafted our first proper press release – one with contact info, a personalised cover letter for each recipient, and so on – and dispatched it to the contacts in our small media list. From then on, we decided on quite a busy schedule of releases, media interviews and other things. While it looked like a lot of PR from our inexperienced perspective, it was actually quite a tame schedule. We could have, and should have fitted more in, especially seeing as many of the things we had planned, such as our two-city media roadtrip, never materialised. (Having complete control over PR, like we did when Marie joined the team in April 2013, would have helped us accomplish that far more easily.)

We also signed up for a Newsclip contract to monitor our media mentions. It was indispensable, but I would warn Newsclip that they better hope a good competitor doesn’t come along. While their staff were always courteous, the service was halting and unreliable. At the end of our contract with them, for example, in January 2014, they completely dropped the ball: they neglected to send us any media reports, and even forgot to tell us that our contract had come to an end. Another frustration was that, during the six months we worked with al dente, Newsclip forwarded all of our media mentions to al dente, and not to us. As such, there’s unfortunately no real way to be sure that we saw all of our media mentions ourselves, unless, I suppose, we trawled through the University of Free State’s online media archive.

Over the course of al dente’s time working with us, we discovered a few, very important things:

Paperight has a very sellable story, but requires careful messaging in order to get the nuances of the system across. There were many things that could have been – and were – misunderstood by journalists covering us. An example of this was the Daily Dispatch journo who made enough errors in her piece for a reader to get the wrong impression about the terms of our service – specifically that it was meant for individuals to use – and have a letter printed in the paper the next day, accusing us of “false advertising”.

We also discovered that having “.com” in our logo gave people the impression that it was a website to be used by individuals, and not by copy shops for individuals, and that it was a consumer-facing website. Taking away the “.com” from our logo and company info tended to dampen those assumptions.

We needed to control our own media list. PR companies, al dente included, consider their media lists to be their intellectual property, which is fair enough, considering that it constitutes the core service of their business. For our purposes, however, it would have been better for us to control our media list ourselves, so we could have a better idea of where our releases were going, what the feedback was, and if we needed to follow up.

We needed to have someone working on our marketing and PR who was part of our team and shared our ethos, and didn’t just think we were a nice client to have in their portfolio. While al dente was a good collaboration, there didn’t seem to have much emotional buy-in above and beyond professional obligations. As al dente wasn’t integrated in our offices, there wasn’t a chance for them to keep close track on changes in our company and with our messaging, and we’d forget to keep them informed as things changed from day to day. As such, they were often two steps behind the game. In a fast-paced start-up setting, flexibility is important, and both the nature and structuring of al dente’s business model – whereby we were only one client out of many – meant that they often couldn’t keep up with our changes.

Specialised PR companies are expensive for start-ups. It might be more time-, effort- and cost-effective to hire a dedicated marketing manager.

Sometimes a strategy emerges without you choosing it, because when you set out you didn’t know you had options. That’s how Paperight’s approach to growth and marketing emerged over the last few years. With hindsight, I can summarise this strategy as:

To do this, we called Paperight a ‘website that turns any printer into a bookstore’, an ‘online library that copy shops use to print books for customers’, and other phrases that described Paperight as a website with downloadable content.

We kept describing the tool, but not the product. To the consumer, the product is a print-out from a local copy shop. To a copy shop, Paperight is a movement, a network of forward-thinking copy shop owners.

The fatal flaw here was that this required us to build brand recognition among consumers for a product that didn’t exist in their world yet. In other words: how could we get consumers to love Paperight before their local copy shop, which they already recognise, is using it? And worse, how could we attract low-income consumers to a web brand, when they spend no time on the web? To a consumer, Paperight is not a website. Describing Paperight as a website is like describing car repair as a spanner. We kept describing the tool, but not the product. To the consumer, the product is a print-out from a local copy shop. To a copy shop, Paperight is a movement, a network of forward-thinking copy shop owners.

Our mistaken approach was holding us back, but we didn’t have enough distance from it to realise that we had other options. I was obsessed with focusing on Paperight as a website. But I knew something was wrong, so I was looking for alternatives. Three key moments were Nick’s appearance on Hectic Nine 9, a misleading article in the Daily Dispatch about us, and Ben Maxwell’s sage session at the Nov 2012 Shuttleworth Foundation Gathering.

While preparing for Hectic Nine 9, whose audience is mostly teens, we realised that sending teens to paperight.com wouldn’t work. We needed to send them to outlets. We did NOT want them arriving at paperight.com and treating it like an ebook store (the interface doesn’t work as an ebook store, and our print-optimised PDFs make for terrible ebooks). But we weren’t allowed to mention brand names on air, like our major copy shop chain Jetline. So we decided to send the audience to a mobile-optimised, consumer-focused site at m.paperight.com. The problem was that when Nick got to the recording, the presenter and producer had other ideas. They were only interested in asking Nick about entrepreneurship, insisted on referring to Nick as the founder of Paperight (which is not a big problem, except that it made Nick uncomfortable), and then showed paperight.com and not m.paperight.com on screen during the interview.

The experience highlighted a few things:

We didn’t have a concise, clear enough message that could cut through what the presenter had in mind about Paperight. Our approach was too broad and fuzzy, so the presenter went with what she thought already.

A mobile site at m.paperight.com cannot be different in look and functionality from paperight.com, because (a) consumers will go to paperight.com by default anyway, and (b) users expect mobile sites to be essentially the same in purpose to their desktop parents.

The whole notion of appealing directly to consumers was flawed because we don’t want them coming to our site. We want them going to our outlets.

Somehow, we had got completely the wrong message to the journalist. We briefly blamed her for being sloppy, but realised soon that it was our fault.

Shortly afterwards, the Daily Dispatch published an article about Paperight that described us explicitly as a site that matrics could use to download exam papers. There was barely a reference to copy shops. To make it worse, the article lightly criticised Paperight for being useful only to matrics who were wealthy enough to have Internet access. Somehow, we had got completely the wrong message to the journalist. We briefly blamed her for being sloppy, but realised soon that it was our fault. We simply weren’t being clear or focused enough in our messaging.

I also realised we (every member of our team) didn’t *love* copy shops enough. If we didn’t truly love them, we wouldn’t be able to create a tribe

We had to put our outlets first in everything. Our messaging, our elevator pitches, our promotional material, and most importantly, our minds. It was after Ben Maxwell emphasised to me the importance of creating in our messaging and on our site a sense of belonging (to a movement) for copy shops that I also realised we (every member of our team) didn’t love copy shops enough. If we didn’t truly love them, we wouldn’t be able to create a tribe, a sense that we were joining them in a grand march of progress.

Importantly, this meant we had to remove all references to our website and to ourselves as an online business or service from our messaging, especially any messaging that consumers might see. What would we replace it with? A movement, a network, a revolution.

Right now, our new messaging is built around the phrase, ‘Paperight is a network of independent print-on-demand bookstores’. If someone asks how we deliver content, we say we do it with a website.

The Daily Dispatch agreed to run a follow-up story with the ‘correct’ information. That story ran a few weeks later (see below, 14 Nov 2012), and is an example of the kind of thing we believe will work much better going forward.